Cisco MDS 9124V Fibre Channel Switch

The next-generation Cisco MDS 9124V 64-Gbps 24-Port Fibre Channel Switch (Figure 1) provides high-speed Fibre Channel connectivity for all-flash arrays and high-performance hosts. This switch offers state-of-the-art analytics and telemetry capabilities built into its next-generation Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) chipset. This switch allows seamless transition to Fibre Channel Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe/FC) workloads whenever available without any hardware upgrade in the SAN. It empowers small, midsize, and large enterprises that are rapidly deploying cloud-scale applications using extremely dense virtualized servers, providing the benefits of greater bandwidth, scale, and consolidation. Some of the main benefits for a smallscale Storage Area Network (SAN) are automatic zoning, nonblocking forwarding and a single port group of 24 ports. Benefits for a mid- to large-size SAN include higher scale for Fibre Channel control-plane functions, Virtual SANs, fabric login (FLOGI), device alias and name server scale, 24 ports of 64-Gbps nonoversubscribed line-rate ports, bidirectional airflow, and a fixed-form NVMe/FC-ready SAN switch with enhanced Buffer-to-Buffer (B2B) credits and capable of hardware-assisted Fibre Channel link encryption. Large-scale SAN architectures built with SAN core directors can expand 64-Gbps connectivity to the server rack using these switches configured in either switch mode or Network Port Virtualization (NPV) mode. Additionally, the switch supports enhanced diagnostic features such as Inter-Switch Link (ISL) and Host-BusAdapter (HBA) diagnostics, remote SFP (Read Diagnostic Parameter) diagnostics, remote port beaconing (Link Cable Beaconing) and advanced reliability features such as link level Forward Error Correction (FEC) with HBA ports.

Main features and benefits

The main features of the Cisco MDS 9124V 64-Gbps 24-Port Fibre Channel Switch include:

• High performance: MDS 9124V architecture, with nonblocking arbitration, provides consistent 64-Gbps low-latency performance across all traffic conditions for every Fibre Channel port on the switch.
• Fully integrated SAN Analytics: This feature-rich switch also offers state-of-the-art data traffic analytics and telemetry capabilities that have been built into this next-generation hardware platform. This new state-of-the-art technology couples the next-generation port ASIC with a fully dedicated Network Processing Unit (NPU). Information is extracted by the port ASIC from passing line rate traffic and used by the NPU to calculate performance data on board the switch in real time. Using an industry-leading open telemetry format, the data can be streamed to any analytics visualization platform.
• Cisco Dynamic Ingress Rate Limiting (DIRL): MDS 9124V supports the dynamic ingress rate limiting feature. Using DIRL, the MDS SAN can automatically detect any symptoms of congestion and then dynamically rate limits the congested and slow-drain devices so that adverse effects are not spread to other devices. DIRL dynamically adapts the rate-limiting to suit the traffic profile of the congestion or slow-drain device.
• Capital Expenditures (CapEx) savings: The 64-Gbps ports allow users to deploy them with existing 32- or 16-Gbps transceivers providing investment protection, with an option to upgrade to 64-Gbps transceivers and adapters whenever needed.